The American Physical Society Is Not The Culprit: We Are (Part II)

   [See also the original posting to which this is a follow-up: Part I.]

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SUMMARY: I agree completely with Jonathan Oppenheim's and Bill Unruh's ends: (1) that authors should be able to publish and post derivative works and (2) that they should be able to adopt the Creative Commons license of their choice. I disagree only with their means: The American Physical Society (APS), the most progressive and adaptable of traditional journal publishers and the first to have adopted a formal policy endorsing Green OA self-archiving after the practice had evolved among its authors, should not now be publicly pressured into making further formal changes as if it were the villain, while so many other publishers still aren't even Green. Evolving practice should precede formal precept in the online age, when the research community is still discovering and exploring the potential of the new medium. The APS would no more try to prevent its authors from posting derivative works than it did in the case of the posting of their preprints and postprints. The practice (and mandating) of Green OA self-archiving, once it has generated universal OA, will effectively moot everything that stands in the way of CC licensing too.

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Re: "Physicists slam publishers over Wikipedia ban" and "Traditional journals and copyright transfer"

Following an exchange of correspondence with Jonathan Oppenheim and Bill Unruh about the above posting, I want to stress that I agree completely with Jonathan Oppenheim's and Bill Unruh's ends:

(1) Derivative Works. Authors should be able to publish new articles which "differ in some reasonable way from the original work, even while possibly retaining much of the original."

I also think APS authors can already do this, and that APS would no more try to prosecute its authors for this practice than it tried to prosecute them for practicing self-archiving (before APS went on to adapt to evolving practice by formally adopting its Green OA policy, the first Green OA publisher policy, and a model for them all).

With derivative works too, formal APS policy will eventually adapt to evolving practice that is to the benefit of research progress in physics. Let practice again precede and guide precept.

(Note that published postprints are in fact "derivative works" relative to unpublished preprints.)

(2) Creative Commons Licensing. I am also fully in favor of CC licensing -- but not as a precondition for OA self-archiving today. All authors should adopt the CC license of their choice whenever they can. And where they cannot, they should just go ahead and self-archive under the Green publisher's current copyright agreement.

(If the publisher is not Green, authors should immediately deposit anyway; and if they wish to set access to their deposit as Closed Access instead of OA during an embargo period, they should rely on their repository's semi-automatic "email eprint request" Button to provide almost-immediate, almost-OA for all would-be users during any publisher embargo.)

(I do believe, though, that CC licensing will prevail as a matter of natural course, after universal OA has prevailed.)

So whereas I agree with Jonathan's and Bill's ends, I do not agree with their means.

Rather than trying to force an immediate formal policy change (if APS feels it needs more time to think it through), I think Jonathan and Bill should just go ahead and practice what they seek to practice: publish new articles which differ in some reasonable way from the original work, even while possibly retaining much of the original, or post them to wikis like Quantiki if they wish. APS formal precept will again follow evolving practice in due course, as it did with author self-archiving.

(By the way, the meaning of the enigmatic title "The American Physical Society is Not the Culprit: We Are" was of course that the reason we don't yet have universal OA [and all that follows from it] is that we are not yet universally self-archiving: I have dubbed this "Zeno's Paralysis.")

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum